EA has kicked off its marketing campaign for Battlefield 4 today with a press release and a 17-minute gameplay video. As you’d expect, the game looks great, but the press release contains a statement that may worry more than a few gamers due to events of the past few weeks regarding another big EA game release.

Recently EA has received a lot of bad press because of the disastrous launch of SimCity. The problem being, the game was always connected and therefore required you log in to a server to play. Come release day, and for the week that followed, EA had grossly underestimated demand for the game and thousands of gamers were left frustrated and unable to play.

So how does this impact Battlefield 4? Well, the press release announcing the game today includes the following:

Taking a page from the social aspect of multiplayer gaming, the single-player mode will now track players’ progress, adding an element of persistence and friendly competition to the campaign.

Tracking and elements of persistence for single player to me suggests a game that needs a server connection. So I contacted EA’s marketing department to see if I could confirm that this is, or is not going to be the case. I heard back from EA Games Label PR Manager Devin Bennett, who is currently in Stockholm promoting the game. He simply said,

We will have more details regarding how DICE will be bringing elements of Battlefield’s signature multiplayer experience to the single player campaign in the months ahead.

You could interpret that response in one of two ways: EA’s marketing team simply don’t know yet, or they don’t want to talk about it yet. If I was EA planning to make Battlefield 4 an always connected title I certainly wouldn’t want to talk about it so soon after the SimCity problems. Gamers still remember the pain of that launch.

For now, we just don’t know what the situation is and will have to wait for someone at EA, or DICE, to definitely confirm or deny that Battlefield 4 is an always connected game. If it is, then you can be sure EA will do a much better job of having servers ready for the launch. You could also argue that requiring a server connection is much less of an issue for this game as Battlefield 4 will mainly be purchased for the multiplayer gameplay.